A Sense of Responsibility
What 60 Minutes Should Do
PostScript
Were Ukrainians Really Devoted Nazis?
Pointing out such salient and pertinent instances of Ukrainian heroic humanitarianism as those
mentioned above would have been a step in the right direction, but it still would not have told
the whole story. Another vital component of the story is that Ukrainians were the victims of
the Nazis, hated the Nazis, fought the Nazis, died to rid their land of the Nazis and to
eradicate Naziism from the face of the earth. This conclusion is easy to document, and yet it
is a conclusion that was omitted from the 60 Minutes broadcast.
Following the trauma of Soviet oppression, following the brutal terror of Communism, the
artificial famine of 1932-33 in which some six million Ukrainians perished, following the
deportation by the Communists of 400,000 Western Ukrainians and the slaughter of 10,000 Western
Ukrainians by retreating Communist forces, the Ukrainian population did indeed welcome the
Germans in 1941. However, disillusionment with the German emancipation was immediate:
The brutality of the German regime became evident everywhere.
The Germans began the extermination of the population on a mass scale. In
the autumn of 1941 the Jewish people who had not escaped to the East were
annihilated throughout Ukraine. No less than 850,000 were killed by the SS
special commandos. Hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war, especially
during the winter of 1941-42, died of hunger in the German camps - a tragedy
which had a considerable effect upon the course of the war, for as a
consequence Soviet soldiers ceased to surrender to the Germans.
At the end of 1941, the Nazi terror turned against active Ukrainian
nationalists, although most of them were not in any way engaged in fighting the
Germans as yet. Thus, in the winter of 1941-42, a group of writers including
Olena Teliha and Ivan Irliavsky, Ivan Rohach, the chief editor of the daily ...
Ukrainian Word, Bahazii, the mayor of Kiev, later Dmytro Myron-Orlyk, and
several others were suddenly arrested and shot in Kiev. The majority of a
group of Bukovinians who had fled to the east after the Rumanian occupation of
Bukovina were shot in Kiev and Mykolayiv in the autumn of 1941. In
Dnipropetrovske, at the beginning of 1942, the leaders of the relief work of
the Ukrainian National Committee were shot. In Kamianets Podilsky several
dozen Ukrainian activists including Kibets, the head of the local
administration, were executed. In March, 1943, Perevertun, the director of the
All-Ukrainian Consumer Cooperative Society, and his wife were shot. In 1942-43
there were shootings and executions in Kharkiv, Zyhtomyr, Kremenchuk, Lubni,
Shepetivka, Rivne, Kremianets, Brest-Litovsk, and many other places.
When, in the second half of 1942, the conduct of the Germans provoked the
population to resistance in the form of guerrilla warfare, the Germans began to
apply collective responsibility on a large scale. This involved the mass
shooting of innocent people and the burning of entire villages, especially in
the Chernihiv and northern Kiev areas and in Volhynia. For various even
minor - offenses, people were being hanged publicly in every city and village.
The numbers of the victims reached hundreds of thousands. The German rulers
began systematically to remove the Ukrainians from the local administration by
arrests and executions, replacing them with Russians, Poles, and Volksdeutshe.
(Ukraine: A Concise Encyclopaedia, Volume 1, pp. 881-882)
Major-General Eberhardt, the German Commandant of Kiev, on November 2, 1941
announced that: "Cases of arson and sabotage are becoming more frequent in Kiev
and oblige me to take firm action. For this reason 300 Kiev citizens have been
shot today." This seemed to do no good because Eberhardt on November 29, 1941
again announced: "400 men have been executed in the city [of Kiev]. This
should serve as a warning to the population."
The death penalty was applied by the Germans to any Ukrainian who gave aid,
or directions, to the UPA [Ukrainian Partisan Army] or Ukrainian guerrillas.
If you owned a pigeon the penalty was death. The penalty was death for anyone
who did not report or aided a Jew to escape, and many Ukrainians were executed
for helping Jews. Death was the penalty for listening to a Soviet radio
program or reading anti-German leaflets. For example, on March 28, 1943 three
women in Kherson, Maria and Vera Alexandrovska and Klavdia Tselhelnyk were
executed because they had "read an anti-German leaflet, said they agreed with
its contents and passed it on." (Andrew Gregorovich, World War II in Ukraine,
Forum, No. 92, Spring 1995, p. 21)
The notion of "collective responsibility" or "collective guilt" mentioned above by means of
which the Nazis justified murdering a large number of innocent people in retaliation for the
acts of a single guilty person is founded on a primitive view of justice which Western society
has largely - but not completely - abandoned, as we shall see below.
